


Four Funerals & A Wedding

by midrashic



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Erik Lehnsherr Defense Squad, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:55:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23447368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: Four people who mourned Erik Lehnsherr, and one who didn't.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr & Pietro Maximoff, Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr/Magda (X-Men), Nina Gurzsky & Erik Lehnsherr
Comments: 43
Kudos: 118





	Four Funerals & A Wedding

1\. Magda

In the end, it is because of him that they even manage to get out of the country at all.

The application to leave the Soviet bloc as a Jewish emigrant seeking asylum is a months-long process, and there is no time left for them. The men in the forest saw Nina, saw what she could do, and though Erik had kept them busy long enough for them to get away, she knows there will be no sanctuary in the village for them, not after tonight. Erik had always talked about sending Nina as a student to Charles Xavier’s school, but he had always been adamant that circumstances might demand that they leave far earlier than planned. So he’d just gotten them American passports.

At the immigration checkpoint, Magda holds her breath. Nina breathes heavily, drugged with a few sips of _krupnik_ , but she had been screaming for her Papa in a way that was drawing stares and attention and could possibly make the officials think that Magda had kidnapped her. Magda holds her against her chest and watches carefully as the man, bored, scans her documents— _Magda Xavier_ and _Antonina Xavier_ , they read—and hands them back to her without any more interest than he’d shown in accepting them.

She nods at him, afraid that somehow her accent will betray her, and boards a plane.

Nina wakes up just after take-off, but though she’s not wailing anymore, her face is still red and she sniffles every now and then, and Magda knows she is thinking of her father. “Look, _kotek_ ,” she says, in English—they may as well get used to it—and points out the window to where the birds are circling, far below. “It’s your friends saying good-bye.”

Nina just turns in her seat and rests her head against the window, and Magda is left to cry to herself, back stiff, tears dripping off her chin, facing straight ahead, silently, so that Nina doesn’t hear and start crying too.

— ⓧ —

She has money—Erik made sure of that—and though New York City is cavernous and frightening, once she boards the bus to Westchester, it is not so bad, after all. They disembark at the bus station and walk up the winding street to 1407 Graymalkin Lane. Nina is lagging behind, though all around her is wildlife that is similar, but different, to what they had at home: new birds, new squirrels, new pests. She is overtired and grieving, and neither of those things Magda can do anything about, at least not until she reaches Charles Xavier.

The school is—beautiful.

It looks like something out of a catalogue. Rich green hills sweep down toward the gate, gardens and hedgerows wind around, yellow flowers peeking up in bloom and a lovely stone bridge leading toward the doors. It is four stories tall, and a regular square tower rises from the middle, a gable roof with dormer windows overlooking it all. And there are children… mutants… _everywhere_. A girl flexing her webbed feet in the fountain, a small boy in a tree, his skin rippling with what looks at first glance to be the shadows of leaves but at second glance is the pattern of his skin changing like a chameleon’s. Huge, spreading trees begging to be climbed and an archery range along the pond. It would stink of luxury if it weren’t for the children, if it weren’t for the way that every inch of this place brims with life, with love.

The students stop to watch her as she goes by. Nina stubbornly doesn’t look at them—so like her father, that one—just clings to her mother’s shirtsleeve so tightly her knuckles have been bleached white. Magda knocks on the door.

A young thin man wearing glasses peeks out at her. “Can I help you?”

“I need to see Dr. Xavier, please,” she says softly.

“Do you… have an appointment?”

“No. It’s important.”

The man looks behind her, where Nina is pressed flush against her legs, and softens. “Just one moment,” he says. “Professor Xavier is finishing up a class right now.”

He takes them to an office, all filled with burnished wood and antique leather, and leaves them there. Magda looks at the stern, stiff-backed chairs in front of the desk and leads them instead to a soft leather couch. She coaxes Nina into taking her shoes off and putting her feet up, and Nina faces sullenly into the back of the couch, stubbornly refusing to close her eyes, despite how tired she is.

Outside, she hears voices, and she stands, nervously wiping travel dust from her dress. And then in comes Charles Xavier, exactly as Erik had described him—the rich brown hair, the kind blue eyes, the wheelchair, though it is a particularly fine one that moves smoothly with the press of a lever. “Hello,” he says. “You’ve come a long way to see me—”

He freezes. And at once, like flipping through a picture book, images of her life with Erik flash before her eyes, and she knows that he is looking, that he is _seeing_ : Erik, battered and thin and exhausted, collapsing on her doorstep; Erik meeting her eyes as he twists his hand and the broken doorknob clicks back into place, making sure she knows who he is; Erik, soft in her bed, his eyes gentle, his touch gentler; Erik, and the gold of the ring he had bought and then modified into a simple plain band, with titanium running through it, because they are unbreakable; Erik, and the pure ecstasy on his face as he holds Nina for the first time; Erik, crouching down, waving a doll in Nina’s face as she grasps for it; Erik, singing a lullaby; Erik, on the forest floor with an arrow pierced through his heart—

Charles Xavier cries out and reels back, clutching his heart in sympathetic pain, and the dam of tears Magda had been holding back cracks open and she begins to sob. The thin young man she’d spoken to before rushes in, speaking so fast the words tumble out of his mouth in nearly the wrong order, “Charles, are you all right—”

“Erik,” Charles gasps, “Erik is dead,” and a complicated set of expressions flickers across the man’s face, finally settling into something approaching sorrow, and Magda hates him, hates that he thinks that he can judge the kindest and most tormented man she has ever known, the best father and the fiercest protector, and Charles Xavier cries out again and presses a hand to his head and says, “Magda, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—”

And the words spill out like the tears she can no longer control. “It was my fault,” she confesses to Charles Xavier, aware that Nina is listening, aware that she can hold it in no longer. “I asked him not to go, I told him we would be safe, and I was wrong, so wrong… they would have killed her—please, help us. He always said you would help us—”

And then Charles Xavier is sitting beside her, and he tentatively reaches out her arms, and they are the wrong shape and the wrong smell but for now, at least, she sits sandwiched between the last two pieces of Erik left in the world—the best two pieces, he’d always insisted to her—and struggles to feel his spirit, one last time.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2\. Nina

Her father told her stories about the school, which she would eventually attend to learn how to control her powers. About the grounds, lush and beautiful, about all the animals there, friends like she’d never seen at home. About how she would be with people like her, and like Papa—special people, people with power. How she would make friends there, and maybe fall in love, and how she would return to her parents confident and strong and in control of everything she could do with her gift.

She’s been at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters for three days, and she _hates it._

Oh, it’s beautiful enough, and the animals are friendly enough, and so even are the students. One of the older girls, Jubilation, gave her a tour and didn’t even mind when she spoke to one of the rabbits hiding behind the trees. Jubilation can make fireworks come out of her fingers, and they explode into bright little sparks when she wants them to. She has her own bedroom, but when she woke up screaming and crying in the middle of the night they let her sleep in the same bed as Mama, so that’s fine. The food is strange, greasy and heavy but good and flavorful too. There’s a lot of meat, which she’s refused to eat ever since she found out where it came from when Papa slaughtered one of their chickens. (He spent a month making it up to her.)

But Papa’s not here, and so she hates it.

Mr. Xavier is a Professor (which is like a teacher but more so), and he wants her to go to classes. They have a special class for students who didn’t grow up speaking English, and though her Papa taught her some, she knows that her accent is heavy and difficult for the younger children—the children her age—to understand. They have special classes for people with powers like hers, nature powers, a class that takes place outside, everyone sitting cross-legged in the dirt, and she actually does want to go to that one; there’s a girl who has her power, except it only works on squirrels, and she also has a tail like a squirrel, and there’s a girl with antlers who can talk to _anything_ in nature, even rocks and plants, and there’s a boy who can make anything grow just by waving his hand over it, and when class is in session they wave to her and smile and beckon her over. She ignores them, though, roaming the grounds, only speaking to the owls and the mice, feeling a little wild herself.

She’s no stranger to death. The earliest she can remember of death is when one of her friends, a pond turtle, stopped visiting her, and Mama had to explain that a raccoon or a bird had probably eaten him. The lives of mice and foxes are not very long, and there is a small line of graves at the edge of their property, and many more pebbles to mark the friends that had simply disappeared. So she knows what happened to Papa. She knows what the gasping sound he made when the arrow pierced his lung means. She knows that he is gone, and even if she found a way to sneak off to an airport and fly back home, he would still be gone.

What haunts her at night is the way he’d cried, “She can’t control them!” and the way he’d pushed her behind himself, hard, not like the touches she was used to from him at all. The way she knows that if she hadn’t called down a storm of birds on the men who’d come to take her Papa away, he’d still be alive.

Mama cried and said it was her fault. Nina knows better.

On the third day, Professor Xavier comes to find her.

She’s crouched at the edge of the stream, tossing pebbles into the lake and watching the fish come up to inspect them. She can’t talk to the fish the way she can talk to the other animals, but sometimes she’ll get flashes of understanding from them, and they can have a little conversation like that, in images. Professor Xavier drifts up next to her and says, gently, “How are you settling in, Nina?”

Nina doesn’t answer. Nina hasn’t said a word except to her friends since Papa died.

Professor Xavier was Papa’s friend. Papa told her stories about him, about how kind he was, about how much he believed in what he was doing for their kind. This Professor Xavier is nothing like the Charles in the stories, though. He is awkward and sad and stares at her sometimes like he’s staring through her.

“Well, Erik always did see parts of me that no one else did,” Professor Xavier says ruefully, and she realizes he’s been reading her mind. She imagines a big red stop sign as hard as she can and feels some satisfaction when he winces. “Point taken. But, my dear, please talk to me if you want me to stay out of your head.”

“I don’t have anything to say,” she says in Polish, and is surprised when he not only understands her, but answers in English:

“That’s all right, then. I suppose we’ll just sit here quietly.”

They do, for a bit. Nina continues tossing pebbles into the water. After a while, Professor Xavier cocks his head and asks what they’re saying.

She shrugs. Normal things, from what she can divine from the flashes they send her. Food and the temperature of the water and whether the hatching will be good this year. Professor Xavier says abruptly, “Your father was the first adult mutant I ever met. I came across him in the middle of an extraordinary use of his powers—he was trying to lift a submarine from the water. I felt his mind, even from far away, and it was… a shock to the system. His mind, when he used his powers, was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I’ve met a lot of mutants since then, and they all feel different when they use their powers. But your father was special. I still think of that moment, sometimes. When I met someone I could call an equal in the water.”

Nina says nothing. She wonders what Papa’s mind felt like, what it would have been like to speak with him effortlessly, without the barriers of language, the way she speaks to her friends, what he had been thinking when he’d—

She cuts herself off. No. No. Professor Xavier is listening, and if he’d loved her father even a fraction as much as she had, he doesn’t deserve those thoughts in his head.

“Nina,” Professor Xavier says. “Nina, please talk to me.”

“You don’t even know us,” Nina blurts out. “Why do you care?”

Professor Xavier’s fingers tap on the arm of his chair. “I know you.”

“What do you know about me?” she demands.

“Everything,” the Professor breathes, like it means something. Angry, she stands, dusts off her dress, prepares to storm off. “Wait,” he says, reaching out for her, but not touching her, as though she’s something too precious to be taken up by earthly hands. “I only meant—I know you’re lost, Nina. I know you miss him. I miss him, too. I just—I just want to make things better for you, and I don’t know how.” She turns her head to look at him, and for the first time she catches a glimpse of a human mind the way she sees animal minds—wordless, pure communication flowing between them. Professor Xavier is projecting his hopelessness, his fear of getting it wrong, his frustration at the way he has soothed so many orphans and yet can’t seem to get through to _her_ because his own grief is getting in the way, and she deserves better than that, he thinks. She doesn’t agree. “What do you want, Nina?” he asks, plaintively. “I only want to give you what you want.”

“I want to say good-bye,” Nina says.

— ⓧ —

He gives her a corner of the garden. Although they’re not dead—none except Dust-on-Feathers and Downiest-Head, who had given up their lives like her Papa, arrows through their breasts, when she’d called them down to attack the men who had been taking him from her, and to whom she gives special thanks, a pebble with a flower—she knows she will never see them again, because she can never set foot in that land again, so she lays markers down for them anyway. One for each of her chickens. One for the stag that waited patiently for her to pull up the bucket of water from their well so he could drink from it. Ones for the hedgehogs, ones for the foxes; one for the snail that lived on her windowsill and one for the stork that slept in the pond behind their house.

She braids together a knot of flowers and sets them on a flat polished stone that one of the fish in the garden had pointed her towards as a particularly sacred stone, one that they would gladly part with if she would stop being so sad. One for Papa. She thinks that he would like the memorial; he always liked leaving flowers in her hair.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

3\. Peter

When his mother hears the news—MAGNETO KILLED DURING CAPTURE IN POLAND VILLAGE—she gasps and sits down hard on the couch. Peter stares at the broadcast, at the grainy photograph of the man, alive, looking scruffier and older than he had when he’d last seen him ten years ago, and tries to imagine that man dead when he had brimmed with such vitality, even after a decade in prison. It’s hard. It’s impossible.

He’d always thought he’d have more time.

He’d never made a concerted effort to track him down, Erik Lehnsherr, after what had happened in DC, after he’d figured out why his mother had gone white when watching the news broadcast. He’d had fantasies, of course, about the man coming to his doorstep, maybe seeking sanctuary with his mother the way he had long ago (he assumes; he doesn’t really know much about the four-month affair that led to his birth, but Lehnsherr was a dangerous man long before he killed the President, so he has vague visions of a man on the run from the authorities holing up in his mother’s attic for a time), and finding out the boy who’d broken him out was… something to him. Initially awkward attempts to be a dad to him, followed by perhaps some bonding over what it was like to be different and alone in a world full of people who moved so _slowly_ , who lived without the same burning intensity that Magneto had exuded.

He’d known they were only fantasies, of course. He’d been nineteen, not _stupid_. But he’d always thought that if the whole world was looking for him, what would one more pair of eyes, even if they were a very _fast_ pair of eyes, do? He’d had other fantasies that someone else would capture Magneto, and he would break into wherever he was being held again, and say—

Too late, too late. He should’ve been looking all this time. 

Behind him, his mother begins to sob.

Because he has nowhere else to go, nowhere else—not for the first time, but for the most disappointing time—to run toward, knows no one else who might possibly feel what he’s feeling, he pulls out the old, stained business card he’d stolen from the man who punched Lehnsherr when they’d broken him out together, and jogs leisurely to New York. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is rich-looking and stuffed with freaks like him and… weirdly quiet, as though a pall has settled on the school, as though someone has just died. When he strolls onto the grounds, a thick blanket of sadness falls over him, choking and suffocating, superseding the shock and numbness following an event he’s still not sure how to make sense of. It’s not his sadness, he doesn’t think. He didn’t know the man well enough for real sadness. His mourning is not grief-mourning, it’s the mourning of possibility denied, of worlds he had imagined for himself that will now never come to pass.

He knocks on the door and a man, dark circles under his eyes, opens it. Peter recognizes him from the break-out; the nerdy one, the one who had created the thing that jammed all the cameras. “Can I help you?” he asks Peter. It takes him a long, long moment—long enough for Peter to leisurely explore the mansion and ascertain that Xavier is passed out on his desk, even though it’s two in the afternoon—to recognize him. “…Peter? What…”

“I want to talk to the guy who punched him,” Peter says.

For some reason, this makes perfect sense to the nerd-man when Peter rarely even makes sense to his own mother on a good day, who pushes his glasses up and rubs at his eyes and begins to say something like, “Now’s really not a good time—” but that’s all Peter needs to hear before he’s pushed the door open and is squeezing past him and taking two rights and a left to where Charles Xavier from the business card is sacked out on his desk.

He studies his snore for a few seconds before he raps his knuckles sharply against the deck, and Xavier startles awake, saying, “Erik—” which is how Peter knows he’s come to the right place.

Xavier stares at him for a long time too before recognition comes. “Peter… Maximoff?” he asks, still sounding a little sleepy, although he looks and _smells_ way better than he had when he’d come to recruit Peter to break into the Pentagon. His hair is still long but neat, no longer stringy, and he’s wearing clothes that have clearly been laundered recently. “What—”

For the first time in a long time, Peter struggles for words. He looks at Xavier pleadingly.

Xavier’s eyes widen. “I see,” he sighs, and Peter seriously doubts that, but Xavier mutters, “Erik, you really had no idea the kind of mourning you would inspire,” and looks at Peter with such compassion and gentleness that Peter actually starts to believe that he knows, somehow, he knows.

All he can say is, _“Fuck_ ,” and he starts to cry.

— ⓧ —

He gets the whole story out between blubbering, and Xavier—who is now in a wheelchair, Christ—hands him a box of Kleenex and pats his shoulder intermittently.

“I didn’t know my father very well either,” Xavier says gently. “He spent most of his time in a different country, doing business things I couldn’t even fathom. All I saw was how his death affected my mother. I thought I wouldn’t miss him. I did, though. It was a surprise to me, that I could miss someone through my mother, that I could miss someone I barely even knew.”

“I’ve never lost anyone before,” Peter mumbles. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to be like.”

Xavier breathes through his nose. “It’s… slow. Some days you think you’ll feel this way forever. You have to find a new routine. Find new daydreams, new fantasies for yourself. But even with a new life, you’ll still find yourself… missing the old one. Sometimes so much it brings you to tears.” He takes the Kleenex back from Peter and says, “Come on. There’s someone who I think might be able to help you with that part.”

Peter follows him outside, trying to take the many, many moments to get ahold of himself. He runs into the nerd-man on the way out, who gives him a severe look that he ignores. Xavier takes him down a winding paved path through the gardens into a copse of trees near the back of the property. A girl, about seven, has climbed a tree and is deep in conversation with a lark of some kind that has hopped onto her shoulder and is gazing at her adoringly. 

“Nina,” Xavier calls. “There’s someone you need to meet.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

4\. Charles

It’s when the bustle of activity stops that he hurts.

If he didn’t know any better—and he _does_ know better, that’s the curse of them, that they _always_ knew better than to expect the best of each other—he would say that Erik had done it on purpose, entrusted him with a pair of children and a grieving widow to take care of take his mind off of his own grief. Erik always was a tactical genius in that way. But there are times, when Peter has coaxed Nina to bed—her own bed, not the bed her mother sleeps persistently on the right side of—when Magda has fallen into an exhausted jetlagged sleep of her own, when Hank has taken over his grading for the evening and Alex, who stayed on after dropping off his brother Scott, is helping the kids with their homework, that he sits in his office and just— _crumples._ Grief like he’s never felt before, not even for his father and mother, not even when Raven and Erik had left him the first time, not even when Alex had left for Vietnam and it had laid him down low—grief like a sweeping wave, grief like a bottomless ocean consumes him, subsumes him, until he is small and sinking into the dark.

Charles sits in his office and looks at the chess game that has been gathering dust for such a long time, for ten years, since they sat across from each other in that plane and started a game that both of them knew they wouldn’t have time to finish, since he rolled into his study for the first time in years and set up the chessboard exactly like they had left it on that plane, and feels the urge to sweep it all into the trash. What is the point of hope if death steals the thing you are hoping for so desperately away?

If love—love for someone else—makes it a moot point anyway?

He likes Magda, is the thing. He can see why Erik fell in love with her. She is strong and capable and cares with the same deep well of emotion that Erik had always hidden. And he loves Nina, because Erik loved Nina, he can see it in her strong will and self-possession and the way a deep chasm of grief for her Papa splits her mind. He is happy—is that the right word, happy?—for Erik that he finally, for however brief a time, found peace. (Even if it is a waste of such passion for their kind, even if surely there were other roads to peace than denying that he was _special_ , that he could do things other could not—he thinks these thoughts and shudders with a wave of self-revulsion, he should be _happy_ , happy happy happy, that Erik finally found what he’d always wished for him, even if it hadn’t been with—)

Happiness tastes like the salt-tang of tears on his tongue.

Here he is, in his study, weeping alone over an abandoned chess set. Hearing the echo of Erik’s rare laugh, but it is already fading from memory. A week without him in the world, a week with the knowledge that he will truly never hear that laugh again, and the crystal-clarity of his memories over the last two decades, since he last heard that laugh, has splintered and faded. It is one thing to suspect that he will never feel Erik’s arms around him again, never hear the low murmur of his voice. It is one thing to wonder whether Erik is out there plotting the next move in their real-life chess game, and fearing that maybe he is not. It is another thing entirely to realize that an entire book of your life is over, closed, and though you can page through your memories of it, it will never be the same. It feels like being crushed by scaffolding, by being shot by a stray bullet.

There are things he wants to tell Erik. _I forgive you_ —he had been too hurt and too bitter the last time they’d seen each other, and he’d hoped Erik knew what Charles letting him escape meant, but one thing he has learned as a telepath over the years is that leaving words unspoken is fertile ground for miscommunication. He wonders if that is why Erik never returned to him, over the years, if Erik thought he was unwelcome. The thought is too painful to be borne, though, so he shakes it off and returns to chess. He’d played with his father, but had gotten out of practice at Oxford. Erik had always been the one who knew the terms, who spoke about strategy with a clear-eyed confidence that Charles had at the time found unbearably sexy. _Zugzwang._ The compulsion to move, even when moving would put you at a disadvantage. To make a choice for the future of your kind, even if it meant giving up the only thing you’d ever wanted for yourself.

He died choking on his own blood in the woods of Poland. Charles isn’t sure what is worse—that if he’d been in Cerebro, that if he’d only _known_ , he could’ve stopped those men—or that Nina always wears Erik's locket, and that he's heard enough of the tale of Magda's terrible flight from the country to know that she wouldn't have had time to reclaim it. To know that _Erik_ could have stopped those men, that he had a choice. And chose peace. At last, peace.

Charles doesn’t want to think about what he would give up to see Erik for another minute. For ten more seconds. For the length of a smile. For the length of a hug. He suspects thinking about it for too long would rather ruin his image of himself as an educator and a mentor. He doesn’t bargain with God—God isn’t listening anyway, or Erik wouldn’t have been faced with a terrible choice for _saving someone_ , humans once again trying to take what was dearest to him away—he doesn’t try to trade away his success or his school or his students. He just _longs_. He just reaches out a shaky, trembling hand and tips over the white king.

It is courtesy to never win a chess game, but let your opponent concede after checkmate. The last move is always the loser’s.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

5\. En Sabah Nur

Once upon a time, there was a king, and the powerful would line up to be judged by him, praying to be taken and raised up by him, to be declared among the most powerful in the land and made even more powerful under his tutelage.

The king knows power, but this world is so large, and people are no longer lining up to be judged by him. He is lucky. The girl he encounters, the girl with weather in her blood—she is powerful. As powerful as his priests of old. But there are so many people, and there is so little time before the world is torn down. He needs to find and locate the most powerful, quickly. If he must settle for those who are strong but not the strongest, he will, but he doesn’t want to. He asks the girl with lightning for bones where he can find the woman on her wall, the blue-skinned woman who so impressed her, and she shrugs and says that no one knows. He asks the girl if there is anyone else she knows with powers like her own, and she thinks and says, “There is one man. He’s dead, though… they killed him.”

“When,” he demands.

“Four days ago,” she says. “He was powerful, though… he was wanted because he was so powerful. He nearly killed… some important people. Before she stopped him. The Hero of Washington.”

Four days. His blood will be cold, but he will not be buried. “Where is he?” he demands of her, and she shows him on a map, a place she calls Poland but that he remembers is only cold forests and colder people.

He takes her arm, and they step outside in a sterile room, filled with metal and the stench of astringents, and a body on a metal table. He has been cut apart and roughly sewn back together; his skin is blue, but his organs are still intact, but for the punctured lung. The king places his hand on the man’s brow, and _calls_.

And with a rushing of life, of greenness, vitality returns to the man. His blood begins to pump; his brain begins to spark. He opens his eyes, blue in the cold light of the room, and shakes; he gasps, raises a hand to where the arrow had pierced his skin. He looks around wildly, his gaze settling first on the storm-girl, then on the king. He is confused; the king will be lenient.

“Nina?” he calls. “Magda? Where…”

“You were dead,” the king intones. “You are no longer.” The man looks up at him with confused eyes, and the king can feel the _power_ rushing through him now, the strength of him, and knows the storm-girl has chosen well. “My son. My disciple. What will you do to repay me for my generosity?”

Slowly, he sees the strength of his power consume the man, his eyes clouding first with devotion, then with determination. “Anything,” he says, “my king,” and the king is triumphant.

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand and one thanks to the gorgeous [librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata/pseuds/librata) for her beta.
> 
> This fic _may_ have a sequel but I make no promises.
> 
> I'm at [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com). If you like my work and want to support me, buy me a coffee. Or, hit me up on [the discord server](https://discord.gg/7HyhZ5R).
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


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